


The Walls of Camelot

by 1Boo



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Gen, Kid Fic, Pointless Attempts at Historical Accuracy That Really Shouldn't Be There, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-14
Updated: 2014-04-14
Packaged: 2018-01-19 09:36:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1464508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1Boo/pseuds/1Boo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The seven-year-old princeling of Camelot tries to puzzle out his world. He doesn't quite manage it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Walls of Camelot

It’s easy to forget, living in the pompous turrets sprouting up from the castle, playing in the brightly painted halls where the high servants are all young and dressed in red and lace, that his city trembles on the edge of wilderness.

It frightens Arthur, when he’s seven, the way the lights go out in Camelot. They do, every evening; few but a fellow princeling could afford to waste good candle wax or kindling when work is done for the day. Dusk, and Camelot lumbers sleepily off to bed, but Arthur does not. He is restless and sends his nurses for candied fruits and wine cut with cold well-water, until he runs them as ragged as he feels.

In the morning Arthur paces the city walls where the guards all know him and pat his golden hair, not quite grown out of its childish curls.

Morgana says he looks like a sheep. Giaus, who is rubbing jewelweed onto their matching nettle stings before they meet the king at midday, says there’s a story they should hear, about a golden fleece and a witch, who helps the hero steal the fleece, but rots in evil and turns against him.

A lot of work for a sheepskin, Morgana says. Do they make pretty gowns?

Sheep are important, Arthur says. Father says so. Father says we have to punish sheep poachers. And hunt wolves.

The two of them look at him sideways, like he’s missed the point.

Arthur mulls it over after his meal, back on the city walls in the afternoon sunlight. He realizes that he does know of stories like this. They’re heretic myths from old Britannia, brought to his city when Camelot was something else, something older, something that did not sit on the edge of the dark wilderness but was a part of it, slipping like a polecat between the trees. It’s a Roman story, carried in the mouths of men with names like Aulus Plautius and Dumnovellaunus.

Arthur is jealous, even ask he stalks along the city walls at his most haughty, allowing guardsmen to hand him their scramaseaxes, single-edged knifes that look like a sword in the hands of a boy, and let him try, though he isn’t nearly big enough, to string one of the longbows. There are arrows tipped with iron and a few made of bone, like the Danish use.

He knows these names of Roman leaders, knows that he will be allowed to wield a sword instead of a scramaseaxe because his blood is the right blood, and he knows iron from bone, thanks to His Grace, his Father. But where he has names and facts Morgana has the stories her old nursemaids weave. She has lady’s maids, too, and girls she whispers with.

It’ll rain in three days, Morgana says, while the two of them sit in uncomfortable, big chairs in the smaller banquet hall. They spend more and more time sitting in uncomfortable clothes and big rooms, waiting for adults. Arthur can’t stop swinging his feet.

You can’t know that, he scoffs.

I can, she says serenely.

You cannot, Arthur argues. That would be magic. You can’t do magic! Bet you couldn’t cut someone with a sword, either. Bet you couldn’t!

I could, says Morgana. And it’s not magic, dummy. It’s knowing what to look for in the clouds. Cunedda taught me. It’s as easy as breaking a wild horse, when you know how.

He’d wanted to retort that breaking a horse is not easy at all, but then their Father comes to collect them, and three days later it rains. So Arthur doesn’t want to bring it up again.

Arthur has boys to shout with too, boys to obey his orders and they know – even if they are bigger, or stronger, or older – that they must obey their prince. It’s nice, and he likes it, the same way he likes the way the sun hits the wall of Camelot, the sheer drop to his left and the thick stone punched through with arrow slits to his right, and the way his stomach stutters when he looks at the drop. But none of what he has explains the wild and misty and strange places beyond.

Morgana must have the stories to explain it all. It would be like her, too, to keep them close to her chest. His half-sister always thinks Arthur will take her things. He could too, because he’s a prince and a boy and an heir. But he doesn’t want her things, or her food – which, if she sees him coming, she’ll stuff into her mouth until she looks like a bullfrog.

Arthur climbs damp, winding steps up a turret, wrinkling his nose at the smell of the latrine far below. A fly nearly goes up his nose.

There’s loud noises coming from up the steep stone steps, and Arthur rounds the stair to find a man hauling a donkey on a rope down the stairs. They donkey has been used to haul carts of stones where part of the castle is being repaired, and now is being taken back to its stable. Arthur doesn’t know this, and is shocked when the donkey’s head rounds the corner of the stair.

The man holding the donkey sees Arthur and flattens himself against the wall and to let him pass. The donkey doesn’t seem to understand the concept of royalty, despite the man’s increasingly desperate tugs on the rope around its mouth. It clatters towards him as if it expects Arthur to be the one getting out of the way. Arthur has been dragging a large stick he found on the walls, where a dog must have dropped it by the bite marks along its length. In a moment of mixed panic and royal disdain, he whacks the donkey across the nose with his stick. Bewildered, it rears back and Arthur ducks by, nose in the air.

Please keep your beast under control while I am in the castle, he says to the man, who is gaping, but at least not laughing, which is what he will do as soon as the grand young prince is out of earshot.

The donkey tries to eat his hair as he passes. Arthur dodges and pretends nothing is amiss. He thinks about a hero and a sorceress teamed up to steal a golden fleece and flattens his hair nervously.

After a moment though, Arthur feels emboldened by his encounter with the donkey and races himself to the top of the tower, where he bursts at a run into rare and brilliant sunlight. From here he can see all of the city of Camelot, the city he knows. The people are all little blurry specks, small enough to be gobs of spit. They are going about their daily business as Arthur has seen them do when he rides his pony through the streets, trailed by a guardsman on a warhorse. How people live perplexes Arthur somewhat, but they are his people, in his city, so it’s his job to protect them, all of them.

He can see all of Camelot from here, yes, everything he knows and loves.

It all looks rather small.

Arthur squints. He knows there is a city in the north called Eoforwic that was once called Eboracum, and before that Eborakon in one of the old languages, and another in the south once called Londinium, then Augusta, that is now called Lundenwic. He knows this because they trade with Camelot sometimes, and the names are on the papers Father’s treasurers draw up.

But Arthur has no name for Camelot but Camelot. Or himself, for that matter. And isn’t that how it should be? Everything with just one name. But he’s beginning to think there’s a story here that hasn’t been told.

The wind up here on the tower begins to feel cold, like there is a rainstorm beyond the hills that he cannot see, but that chills the air and puts the smell of wet things on the wind. Arthur refuses to go down, even though it’s not quite comfortable out here and in all likelihood he won’t run into the man with the donkey again.

There is something out in the forests that encroach on the fields of Camelot, the ones around the edges where lambs can be lost and crops trampled by herds of big red deer, and where bigger things than donkeys roam. The forest, a carpet over the sharp-looking hills, stretches ever forward like Arthur’s city is a wound which the skin of the land must close over.

It looks dark, that forest, and full of mist. He cranes his neck, watches the sky, tries to tell if it is going to rain. He leans on the sun-warmed parapet and doesn’t feel the heat of the stone, so busy trying to see if there are people in the shadows of the trees, anyone coming towards Camelot, ready to help him untangle this feeling, this strange and silly impulse that tells him…tells him what he’s afraid of in the forest, it’s in the foundations of these very stones, where his fingers grip and slip, sweat-slick.

But it’s not coming out today, and Arthur isn’t attuned to this sort of thing, not really, not yet. The walls of Camelot are still enough to keep heroes and sorcerers at bay, for now.

**Author's Note:**

> I made vague attempts to place Camelot in British history, not because that really makes any sense (ironic cause Camelot is a piece of British myth/heritage and this is all an allusion to the importance of having stories as part of a cultural heritage hahaha I'm pretentious) but also because research is fun. The two cities mentioned are old names for London and York. Gaius tells the Greco-Roman myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece.


End file.
